


Drug of Choice

by LyraNgalia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced BDSM, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Sherlock Rare Pair Bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 03:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1842730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyraNgalia/pseuds/LyraNgalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes thinks he should feel guilty for hiding his lovers from each other. But is he really hiding anything, or do Irene Adler and John Watson see more than Sherlock gives them credit for?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Sherlock Rare Pair Bingo](http://rarepairbingo.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr, for the free space fill.

John Watson knew.  
  
It was no secret that John didn't possess Sherlock's skills of observation. But years in close proximity to his friend and lover's skills, coupled with his physician's training, had given John a certain sixth sense about Sherlock, about what precipitated Sherlock's disappearances, returning precisely eight days later concealing bruises, welts, and precise cuts that bloomed angry and livid against his pale skin, with a bright-eyed intensity he could not hide.  
  
It started with boredom, a few weeks before one of his disappearing acts. A sharper edge to his tone when dismissing cases, one most people accepted as simply Sherlock Holmes. But John knew better, he heard in the sharpness the brittle tension, the addict's craving and the nihilist's gloom. He saw in the twitch of Sherlock's fingers, the holding of a phantom cigarette. He felt it in the kisses that grew harsher and hungrier, in the hands that gripped him hard enough to bruise, hard enough to make him gasp in pain rather than pleasure.  
  
They were the little clues, the little hints that broadcasted Sherlock's craving for his addiction to the one person who knew him as intimately as John did.  
  
And like clockwork, the boredom would pass and Sherlock would draw in on himself with laser-like focus, would retreat to a part of his brain where even John could not easily coax him out. And he would disappear, returning calmed and more himself again, as if some demon had been purged from him, some addictive craving satiated.  
  
Despite Sherlock's attempts to hide it, John knew exactly what that craving was. The addiction that his best friend and lover could not shake. The craving that was stronger than even his recovering addiction from cocaine.  
  
And her name was Irene Adler.  
  
He had been understandably angry when he'd found out she was still alive, understandably angry, understandably hurt, by what had seemed to be Sherlock's betrayal. But that anger and that hurt had passed, had faded slowly, dying like an untended fire. After all, it was no worse betrayal than Sherlock's own faked death, and a little part of John admitted he was relieved that she was still alive. That his own lie on Mycroft's behalf would never be revealed.  
  
And later, when he realized that Sherlock's disappearances were into the arms of the Woman, with her razor sharp intellect her whips and her chains and her lipstick on his collar, he tried to find that anger again. That jealousy that should burn with him, that he expected to burn and fade. How surprised was he to realize it was nowhere to be found.  
  
John wondered to himself how he could now feel so little towards the Woman, the one Woman who mattered according to Mycroft Holmes, the Woman who had once stunned his now-lover into inarticulate gibbering. Was it simply that he was, by now, so used to Sherlock's tendencies, his selfishness and his eccentricities, that John found himself deadened to jealousy?  
  
It had taken one ill-advised undercover case for John to realize that was most certainly _not_ the reason.  
  
It came to him three nights after Sherlock's latest disappearance and reappearance, tangled in the sheets in a dark room that Sherlock somehow seemed to believe would be enough to hide his bruises, that the man he loved came back from his excursions _better_ than when he'd left them. That in some ways, his times worshiping at the Woman's temple sharpened Sherlock's facilities, made him a more focused lover, a more dedicated detective. As if she were a whetstone-- no, that would be to give Irene Adler far too little credit. Rather that they were both knives, pitted and bowed by the too-ordinary world and only brought back to true by honing against one of equal sharpness.  
  
It was a revelation to John, though one that, as he turned it around in his mind, made a surprising amount of sense. He had no illusions that compared to Sherlock Holmes, John Watson was ordinary. That while emotion and sentiment tied them together, there would always be a part of Sherlock Holmes that he could never reach, a part of Sherlock's intellect, the thing that he prized so much as the most essential part of his being, that was beyond John's attempts to understand.  
  
And yet it was a part that the Woman, with her own extraordinary intellect, had been able to touch, to challenge and to flummox. Wasn't that, after all, what had drawn Sherlock to the serial murdering cabbie? To Moriarty? To Irene Adler the first time? The need for a challenge, a puzzle, the possibility of losing. For all John's love and loyalty, intellectual challenge was not something he could offer Sherlock Holmes.  
  
It was not an easy pill to swallow, but living with Sherlock Holmes had taught John to accept a wide array of things. To accept that the man he loved would have needs John could not fulfill seemed to be only one more on the list. He supposed it was less surprising, less stomach-turning, than finding that half-dissected head in the crisper drawer.  
  
And, his pragmatic physician brain added wryly, she was less likely to kill him than cocaine.  
  



	2. Chapter 2

The tangled sheets had long since fallen to the ground beside the bed, and Sherlock could care less about the state of said sheets as the Woman leaned across him to reach for the package of cigarettes on the hotel bedside table, her breasts pressed warm and soft against his stinging, already sensitized skin. Her long thin fingers closed on the cigarettes, drawing one back with her as she settled back to the bed. This was a familiar routine for them in a relationship that was anything but routine, and Sherlock obliged, moving to pick up and hold out the lighter. She leaned forward to light the cigarette at her lips before settling back against him, drawing in a deep, slow inhale as he lit his own.

“You're feeling guilty again,” she told him. “You're considering leaving John.”

He glared at her as he inhaled, momentarily unable to answer. She arched an eyebrow in response and her lips twitched as she waited for him to exhale a thin stream of blue-grey smoke. “I'm having a post coital smoke, Woman,” he answered. “That's all.”

Irene laughed and flicked her cigarette, letting ashes scatter carelessly to the floor of the hotel room. “You're also thinking,” she countered. “You're _always_ thinking, and right now you're thinking about how much you needed this holiday.” She ran a finger along his side, following the path of a bright red lash mark against his ribs. “You're thinking about how John doesn't understand the appeal, and trying not to admit he doesn't fascinate you the way I do because he's ordinary. And you're thinking that it's a bit not good to think your lover is ordinary. But you don't feel guilty for it because it's the truth, and you feel guilty for not feeling guilty.” She paused and took another long drag from the cigarette, the look on her face daring him to prove her wrong.

He scowled in response, trying to ignore the way her fingertips against raw nerves sent tiny jolts of pain and pleasure down his side. There _was_ no denying her words, but the smug look on her face made him want to, even as his pupils dilated as he looked at her. She challenged him, her barbs and her words digging deep beneath his skin in a way John's quiet rebukes did not, and he _liked_ it. He took another long drag from his cigarette, letting smoke fill his lungs as thoughts chased themselves relentlessly in his brain, slowed only a little by the cocktail of endorphins and nicotine in his veins.

“Shouldn't I _want_ to find my lover extraordinary?” he asked, running a finger along her hip, following the tracery of red lashes on her skin. “John Watson will never be you, Woman. I can read him. And he will never understand why I need this. Why the pain matters.”

She laughed quietly, the sound low in her throat, and she slipped easily out of his arms and the mussed bed, her cigarette still in hand. Her nudity did not bother her one iota as she made her way to the floor length window, and she stood at it and contemplated the scenery, the cigarette an occasionally glowing ember as she smoked. “For someone who sees so much, you're still remarkably blind about yourself, Mr. Holmes,” she informed him, turning her head so that she could see him at the edge of her field of vision, the gesture making the tangle of her hair sway against her back. She chuckled again. “Don't be offended. It's the truth. You don't see it, how he grounds you. How John Watson connects you to London. To all those stupid little people with all their problems.”

Irene took another long drag from her cigarette and exhaled slowly, as if savouring the moment. “Can you really imagine us together, day after day? You'd tell my clients about their cheating spouses and I'd tie those idiots who come to you to find their lost cats to the shower rod and neither of us would ever get the puzzles we want.” She shook her head, tossing her hair back over her shoulder, and snuffed the cigarette out on the window, dropping the butt carelessly to the thick carpet. She continued speaking, her words dismissive, “Shag in the same bed week after week? Neither of us would ever get the milk. We're rubbish together for any length of time.”

She turned back to him then, and there was an undeniable fondness in her eyes as she looked at him, a wicked quirk to her lips. His cigarette smoldered, unattended, between his fingers, and his brows furrowed as he worked his way through her words, as the certainty of truth in the words sank in to him. “Murders are puzzles to me. Corpses are puzzle pieces. People are games to you. Things to play with. Chess pieces.” he said slowly. “But to John they're _people._ People he thinks he can save.”

Irene nodded, pleased. “You're on the side of the angels,” she reminded him. “You like being there. But you're not one of them, and you need one of them to be the conscience you don't think you have.” She waved a negligent hand. “And that's your John Watson. Lover and guardian angel in one. Helps that he's handy with a pistol, when your clients decide they've had enough of your charm.” His lips twitched at that, and hers mirrored his. “I'm better suited to be the other woman, Mr. Holmes. An escape from the monotony. The serpent to your Eve, if you haven't deleted that particular reference.”

He laughed, the sound neither harsh nor amused but something in-between, something mocking and self-deprecating. “Are you encouraging me to be a philanderer, Miss Adler?”

She laughed, and took another drag from her cigarette, gesturing at him with it, eyeing him from behind the thin veil of blue-grey smoke. “Are you insisting you suddenly want to play by the world's rules?” she retorted. She gave him a skeptical look at the very idea. “We'd kill each other if we were together. You bore yourself to death if you were only with him. Why choose when you can have both? The fretting lover back home and the addiction abroad? Choosing is only for people who play by the rules, and I don't intend to.”

That made him smile, and he took a drag from his cigarette, letting the smoke fill his lungs before he blew it out in a long steady stream towards the ceiling. “You're as much of as addict as I am, Woman,” he said, and they both knew he was not referring to the cigarettes. “I suppose neither of us care enough to quit.”

Neither of them would _want_ to.


End file.
